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More fan and sensors?

Posted by Vuokko 
More fan and sensors?
March 10, 2016 05:46PM
This is only idea right now while I'm waiting parts to arrive for my printer. I have thought building warm (about 50C) cabinet and adding some three wire fans.

Every motor should have temperature sensor and fan. Also electronics should be equipped with them. I'm also thinking measuring active charcoal - HEPA filter intake and outlet temperature. There would be best place to heat the cabinet air. That fan should also be monitored. That makes 8 RPM input and PWM output channels and many temperature sensors. As 1-wire sensors can go up to +125C they would be good or fail miserably.

To do all this with RAMPS, another MCU board is needed. Additional feature is full power start and keeping the fans spinning all the time but only in needed power level which would mean less noise and longer life. This is the easy part.

The hard part is the firmware and communication implementation.

If this new part shows as device with address and bunch of registers like set chamber temp, get temps for filter/heater and motors it would still be rather easy to implement in rather automatic way. There is G-code for setting chamber temp. Even end of print could easily implemented to ventilate as much as possible through the filter to remove the smell of molten plastics and removing residual particles.

But people using 3D printers are geeks. They want to see different kind of graphs. What G-code should be used to query the temps and RPMs of fans?

Is this totally stupid, undoable or just plain bad idea?
Re: More fan and sensors?
March 12, 2016 03:50PM
The M408 gcode reports a bunch of status information including fan RPMs. Both PanelDue and the web interface for RepRapFirmware already display the RPM of the print cooling fan, if it is a 4-wire fan.

Arduino/RAMPS is for budget printers. You would be better off using a modern 32-bit controller board with fewer limitations for what you want to do.



Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].
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